Wednesday, 31 October 2012

It's been a week, have another blog post :3

First off, it's come to my attention that I've put absolutely no life drawing on this blog o-o Despite it being named, 'life drawing, ramblings, digital animation and much more' tonight will be my third life drawing session since being at university, so I feel I should get on that. I shall, as soon as I get my camera from back home, photograph what I've done and post it up here ^-^

Life drawing is something I need to practice a lot, as I don't feel very confident with drawing the human form yet (fine art and fine art specialisms at A level were quite a struggle for me) However, practice makes perfect and I've already seen improvement from just my first and second session here, so hopefully this upward curve will continue with my sessions.

Anyways ~
Onto the main subject of this blog post :D This random paper animated cube guy :3
Two weeks ago, we were given the task of animating a cube character jumping from one spot to another and then reacting to something off screen. This character was not allowed to have any feet, fingers or features and this task was to test our ability to convey emotions in simple characters.

I did this task using animation paper and a line tester, much in the way I had done my two 2D ball animations.

I decided my reaction would be for my character to wave. This task also allowed me to practice some of the basic principles of animation we were taught. Over the course of the past couple of weeks, we have been taught some vital principles of animation and have been allowed to check these out through projects such as my heavy and light ball animation. We were taught about the persistance of vision, frame rates and so far have learned 6 of the main principles related to animation.

Anticipation is pretty self explanitory, making a character anticipate something, be this walking, jumping or anything else. We were taught never to animate anything from a static, standing position and always make a character anticipate the movement (aka making a character lean back a little before begining to walk forwards)

Overlap is pretty much the opposite of anticipation, making a character move over a finish point a little bit, then making it stop, instead of just putting it into a stopping position to begin with. This is used to help emphasise movement, something considered very important in animation.

Emotion is how a character shows body language, it was explained to us that it is difficult for audiences to empasise with a character that isn't being expressive with body language.
We were told about a technique called the 'sillohette technique' which is used to make sure your characters are being expressive enough, it involves removing colour from an animation in order to see whether you can still tell what is going on from the movement.

Finally, exageration is another way to show Emotion, animation is almost always exaggerated and larger than life asnd without it being this way, it'd be pretty plain and boring.

Anyway, now i've gotten that down, lets talk about what i've done for this task! :D

I actually attempted this task twice, just because my first try I was really, really not happy with. It looked fine when I was working with it on the light box, however, when it came to actually line testing it, it really didn't look right at speed. (I hadn't animated the jump high enough and it ended up just looking not very smooth)

My second attempt (rubbed out most frames and re-did the jump part) I am much more pleased with
You can see this one below

So yush :D Two animations showing a reaction to something off screen o-o I shall see you all in my next blog post :D